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Presented for the first time at the Rambam Summit: a Rambam-led international team of scientists and scholars has elucidated the genetic structure of the Jewish people at the whole-genome level. Their conclusion: More than 90% of Jews share a tight genetic affiliation.
Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical, and cultural traditions. Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by multiple migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa, and Asia - in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora. Previous genetic studies have demonstrated shared paternal lineages with multiple founder events for maternal lineages -- but have not examined the implications at the whole-genome level across a broad spectrum of Diaspora communities.
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Prof. Karl Skorecki presenting this genetic research at the Rambam Summit
Photo credit: Pioter Fliter |
An international team of research scientists and scholars from Israel, Estonia, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States has now completed a comprehensive analysis of more than 600,000 DNA markers, distributed across the entire genome, to obtain an integrated picture of the genetic structure of the Jewish people descendent from 14 Diaspora communities, and in comparison with 69 worldwide non-Jewish populations. The results are reported in the current issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature.
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Dr. Doron Behar
Photo credit: RHCC |
Dr. Doron Behar of the Rambam Health Care Campus (RHCC) is the report’s lead author together with Dr. Richard Villems of the Estonia Biocenter in Tartu, where Dr. Behar is also a research fellow. Other Rambam researchers involved are Prof. Karl Skorecki and Dr. Guennady Yudkovsky Technion's Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute on the Rambam campus.
Results and analysis show a previously unappreciated fine genetic architecture shared by the populations of the Middle East. Specifically, they highlight a Levantine ancestry component, with which Jews descendent from communities covering more than 90% of the Jewish population show a tight genetic affiliation. This genetic clustering and overlap with certain Levantine populations exceeds overlap with neighboring host non-Jewish populations in the vast majority of cases. These findings are consistent with shared origins in the Levant, followed by migrations and degrees of assimilation and admixture with local non-Jewish populations that differ among the various Diaspora Jewish communities. Thus, the genetic evidence, now at a genome-wide level, is consistent with the conventional historical narrative of the origins and population structure of the Jewish people.
Links to the Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09103.html
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/landmark-study-proves-90-of-jews-are-genetically-linked-to-the-levant-1.295231
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/science/10jews.html
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